Under the Black Flag
Page 1
PRAISE FOR
UNDER THE BLACK FLAG
“Folks who began reading about pirates in their childhood (remember Long John Silver and Captain Hook?) have no reason to stop now. Under the Black Flag provides a satisfying and salty overview of nautical badmen (and a few women too) going back some 500 years.”
—Parade
“Cordingly provides some fresh insights into the rough democracy of pirate life.”
—The New York Review of Books
“An excellent description of the methods, means of recruitment, way of life and generally dismal ends of the pirates who flourished from the sixteenth to the end of the eighteenth century.”
—The Boston Globe
“Even if you don’t know a corsair (a Mediterranean-based pirate) from a buccaneer (a Caribbean pirate), this book will delight and inform.”
—Publishers Weekly
“[This] expert and deftly written history of the golden age of piracy … effortlessly expands its scope to become social, cultural, literary, and even cinematic history, through which Steven Spielberg and J. M. Barrie wander shoulder to shoulder with Blackbeard and Captain Morgan. Cordingly brilliantly and engagingly demonstrates how myths are formed—and how very much we live by them.”
—CALEB CARR, author of The Alienist
“A distinguished specialist in maritime history has written a fascinating narrative.… Informative, engrossing.”
—Booklist
“A vivid account of the glory days of buccaneers.”
—Civilization
2006 Random House Trade Paperback Edition
Copyright © 1996 by David Cordingly
Maps copyright © 1995 by Alec Herzer
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Random House Trade Paperbacks, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
RANDOM HOUSE TRADE PAPERBACKS and colophon are trademarks of Random House, Inc.
Originally published in hardcover in the United States by Random House, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., in 1996.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Cordingly, David.
Under the black flag: the romance and reality of life among the pirates / David Cordingly.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references.
eISBN: 978-0-307-76307-5
1. Pirates. I. Title.
G535.C635 1995 95-41414
910.4′5—dc20
www.atrandom.com
v3.1
PREFACE AND
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
In May 1992 an exhibition entitled Pirates: Fact and Fiction opened at the National Maritime Museum in London. It was scheduled to last four months but proved so popular that it remained open for three years. The exhibition was organized by my colleague John Falconer and myself, with help from many members of the museum staff and support from a great number of contributors. Exhibits included artifacts from the sunken pirate city of Port Royal, Jamaica; Captain Kidd’s privateering commission from the Public Record Office; fine portraits of Robert Louis Stevenson and William Dampier from the National Portrait Gallery; Byron’s manuscript copy of The Corsair; the Peter Pan costume worn by Pauline Chase in the 1909 London production, and the pirate costumes worn by Dustin Hoffman and Bob Hoskins in Steven Spielberg’s film Hook; W. S. Gilbert’s annotated prompt copy of The Pirates of Penzance; pieces of eight, ducats, and doubloons from the British Museum; and charts, weapons, logbooks, ship models, and buccaneer journals from the National Maritime Museum.
As a result of the widespread publicity which accompanied the opening of the exhibition I was approached by Suzanne Gluck of the New York literary agents ICM, and urged to write a book which contrasted the fictional image of piracy with the reality. I would like to thank Suzanne for starting me on a most enjoyable project, and to record my debt to Ann Godoff, my editor at Random House, who persuaded me to transform my first manuscript into a book which will, I hope, have a wider appeal beyond those interested in maritime history. I am grateful to Alan Samson and Andrew Gordon at Little, Brown, my publishers in England, for helping me to clarify my thoughts in a number of areas. I would also like to record my thanks to Giles O’Bryen, Clinton Black, Gillian Coleridge, John Falconer, Enrica Gadler, William Gilkerson, Alec Herzer, Helga Houghton, Kevin McCarey, David Marley, Julia Millette, Dian Murray, Peter Neill, Richard Pennell, Linda Silverman, and Norman Thrower, as well as the staff at the Library of Congress, the British Library, the Institute of Jamaica, the London Library, the Public Record Office, and my former colleagues at the National Maritime Museum. Above all I would like to thank my wife and family for their encouragement, advice, and numerous suggestions during the preparation of this book and the exhibition which preceded it.
The sources used in the text are given in the Notes and Bibliography at the end, but I would like to acknowledge my particular debt to four books which I would recommend to anyone wishing to pursue the subject in more depth. The first is Robert Ritchie’s book Captain Kidd and the War Against the Pirates, which must be the most thoroughly researched and documented book on the life of a pirate ever written. The second is Marcus Rediker’s Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea. Apart from its revelations about the life of the ordinary seaman, this contains a penetrating analysis of the Anglo-American pirates in the early eighteenth century. The third is The Sack of Panama by Peter Earle, which features a vivid and balanced account of Sir Henry Morgan’s expeditions, and is based on research in the Spanish archives. The fourth is Nicholas Rodger’s The Wooden World. This scarcely mentions pirates but provides an extraordinary insight into how the Royal Navy worked and what went on above and below deck. In quoting from seventeenth- and eighteenth-century manuscripts and printed books, I have followed Rodger’s example and used modern spelling, punctuation, and capitalization. I have only broken this rule when it seemed to me that the original spelling and use of abbreviations provided additional information about the writer and the circumstances under which the document was written.
D.C.
Brighton, Sussex
February 1995
CONTENTS
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Preface and Acknowledgments
List of Maps
Introduction
1 Wooden Legs and Parrots
2 Plundering the Treasure Ports
3 Sir Henry Morgan
4 Women Pirates and Pirates’ Women
5 Storms, Shipwrecks, and Life at Sea
6 Into Action Under the Pirate Flag
7 Torture, Violence, and Marooning
8 Pirate Islands and Other Haunts
9 Sloops, Schooners, and Pirate Films
10 Captain Kidd and Buried Treasure
11 Hunting Down the Pirates
12 Trials, Executions, and Hanging in Chains
Afterword: The Romance of Piracy
Photo Insert
Dedication
Appendix I
Appendix II
Appendix III
Appendix IV
Notes
Glossary of Sea Terms
Bibliography
About the Author
LIST OF MAPS
The Caribbean and Central America, 1500 to 1730
The East Coast of North America in the early 18th Century
Jamaica, with inset of Port Royal in the late 18th Century
The Indian Ocean around 1700
Pamlico Sound and Chesapeake Bay around 1700
The West Coast of Africa in the early 18th Century
INTRODUCTION
Most of us will never meet any pirates, and yet we know, or we think we know, exactly what they looked like. We learned about them when we were children. We have seen them on the stage and screen. They are as recognizable as cowboys, and like cowboys, they have acquired a legendary status. They have inspired some of the finest writers of the English language, and two pirate stories in particular, Treasure Island and Peter Pan, have become literary classics.
Over the years fact has merged with fiction. Inevitably some of the stories vanish into thin air when they are examined. Most people assume that pirates made their victims walk the plank because that is the fate which Captain Hook was planning for the Lost Boys, but real pirates had no time for such ceremonies. Seamen who resisted a pirate attack were hacked to death and thrown over the side. The typical plunder was not chests full of doubloons and pieces of eight, but a few bales of silk and cotton, some barrels of tobacco, an anchor cable, some spare sails, the carpenter’s tools, and half a dozen black slaves.
Not all the images associated with pirates prove to be fictitious. The popular view of what they looked like is surprisingly close to reality: pirates really did tie scarves or large handkerchiefs around their heads, and they did walk around armed to the teeth with pistols and cutlasses. The common practice in theatrical productions and films of dressing pirate captains in the frock coats and full-bottom wigs of the Stuart period also makes sense because it was in the reign of King Charles II that the buccaneers of the Caribbean were at their most active.
The aim of this book is to examine the popular image of pirates today, to find out where this image came from, and to compare it with the real world of the pirates. The picture which most of us have turns out to be a blend of historical facts overlaid with three centuries of ballads, melodramas, epic poems, romantic novels, adventure stories, comic strips, and films. In the process, the pirates have acquired a romantic aura which they never had in the seventeenth century and which they certainly never deserved. Pirates were not maritime versions of Robin Hood and his Merry Men. Piracy, like rape, depended on the use of force or the threat of force, and pirate attacks were frequently accompanied by extreme violence, torture, and death. John Turner, who was chief mate of the ship Tay, was captured by Chinese pirates in 1806 and held prisoner for five months. He was beaten and kicked and imprisoned at night belowdecks in a space eighteen inches wide and four feet long; but this was nothing compared with the treatment meted out to officers of the Chinese navy who had also been captured. Turner described how one man was nailed to the deck through his feet with large nails, “then beaten with four rattans twisted together, till he vomited blood; and after remaining some time in this state, he was taken ashore and cut to pieces.” The pirates disemboweled another officer, cut out his heart, soaked it in spirits, and ate it.1
Similar horror stories emerge from the Mediterranean and the West Indies. One of the most poignant accounts of a pirate attack was written by Miss Lucretia Parker, a young woman captured by Cuban pirates in 1825. She was traveling from St. Johns to Antigua in the sloop Eliza-Ann under the command of an Englishman, Captain Charles Smith. On the eleventh day of the voyage they were intercepted by a small schooner whose decks were crowded with heavily armed pirates. After a brief fight the pirates captured the Eliza-Ann, looted her, and sailed both vessels to a small island off the coast of Cuba. All the victims were rowed ashore. Miss Parker later described their fate in a letter to her brother George who lived in New York:
Having first divested them of every article of clothing but their shirts and trousers, with swords, knives, axes, &c, they fell on the unfortunate crew of the Eliza-Ann with the ferocity of cannibals! In vain did they beg for mercy and intreat of their murderers to spare their lives! In vain did poor Capt. S. attempt to touch their feelings and to move them to pity by representing to them the situation of his innocent family—that he had a wife and three small children at home wholly dependent on him for support! but, alas, the poor man entreated in vain! his appeal was to monsters possessing hearts callous to the feelings of humanity! having received a heavy blow from one with an axe, he snapped the cords with which he was bound, and attempted an escape by flight, but was met by another of the ruffians, who plunged a knife or dirk to his heart! I stood near him at this moment and was covered with his blood—on receiving the fatal wound he gave a single groan and fell lifeless at my feet.… Dear brother, need I attempt to paint to your imagination my feelings at this awful moment!2
Miss Parker expected to become the next victim, but it soon became clear that the pirate captain was keeping her for himself. Her virtue was saved by the appearance of a British warship on the horizon. The pirates abandoned the Eliza-Ann and fled. They were later captured and taken to Jamaica, where Miss Parker identified them. They were all hanged.
There has been piracy since the earliest times. There were Greek pirates and Roman pirates, and centuries of piracy when the Vikings and Danes were ravaging the coasts of Europe. The southern shores of England were infested with smugglers and pirates during Tudor times. A group of Dutch pirates called the Sea Beggars, or Watergeuzen, played a small but critical role in the history of the Netherlands. In 1571 and 1572 they temporarily abandoned their plundering raids and joined the forces of William of Orange to help liberate their country from the Spanish. In the Mediterranean, pirates took part in the holy war which was waged between the Christians and the Muslims for several centuries: Barbary corsairs intercepted ships traveling through the Strait of Gibraltar or coming from the trading ports of Alexandria and Venice, swooping down on the heavily laden merchantmen, in their swift galleys powered by oars and sails. They looted their cargoes, captured their passengers and crews, and held them to ransom or sold them into slavery.
The French played a major part in the history of piracy. Many of the most successful and most fearsome of the buccaneers who prowled the Spanish Main came from French seaports. Corsairs based at Dunkirk menaced the shipping in the English Channel in the mid-seventeenth century. Their most famous leader was Jean Bart, who was responsible for the capture of some eighty ships. He later joined the French navy and was ennobled by King Louis XIV in 1694.
The Red Sea and the Persian Gulf were always notorious for pirates, and the Malabar coast on the western shores of India was home to the Maratha pirates, led by the Angria family, who plundered the ships of the East India Company during the first half of the eighteenth century.
In the Far East there was piracy on a massive scale. The Ilanun pirates of the Philippines roamed the seas around Borneo and New Guinea with fleets of large galleys manned by crews of forty to sixty men, launching savage attacks on shipping and coastal villages until they were stamped out by a naval expedition in 1862. But the most formidable of all, in terms of numbers and cruelties, were the pirates of the South China Sea. Their activities reached a peak in the early years of the nineteenth century, when a community of around forty thousand pirates with some four hundred junks dominated the coastal waters and attacked any merchant vessels which strayed into the area. From 1807 these pirates were led by a remarkable woman called Mrs. Cheng, a former prostitute from Canton.
Although the Chinese pirates and the Barbary corsairs will appear in some of the ensuing chapters, this book concentrates on the pirates of the Western world, and particularly on the great age of piracy, which be
gan in the 1650s and was brought to an abrupt end around 1725, when naval patrols drove the pirates from their lairs and mass hangings eliminated many of their leaders. It is this period which has inspired most of the books, plays, and films about piracy, and has been largely responsible for the popular image of the pirate in the West today. The period opens with the emergence of the buccaneers in the Caribbean. It includes the savage raids of Henry Morgan on Portobello and Panama, and the unfortunate life and miserable death of Captain Kidd. It reaches a peak around 1720, when some two thousand pirates were terrorizing ships on both sides of the Atlantic and seriously threatening the trade of the American colonies.
Before proceeding any further, we need to be clear about the difference between piracy and privateering, and the use of the words “corsair” and “buccaneer.”
A pirate was, and is, someone who robs and plunders on the sea. According to a law against piracy which was passed in the reign of King Henry VIII, the term not only applied to robbery on the high seas but also to felonies, robberies, and murders committed in any haven, river, creek, or place where the Lord High Admiral had jurisdiction.
A privateer was an armed vessel, or the commander and crew of that vessel, which was licensed to attack and seize the vessels of a hostile nation. The license was issued in the form of a document known as a “letter of marque and reprisal.” Originally the license was granted by the sovereign to enable a merchant whose ship or cargo had been stolen or destroyed to seek reprisals by attacking the enemy and recouping his losses, but by the sixteenth century the system was being used by maritime nations as a cheap way of attacking enemy shipping in time of war. By issuing letters of marque to private ships, the sovereign was saved the cost of building and maintaining a large standing navy.
The letter of marque was an impressive-looking certificate written in ponderous legal phrases and decorated with elaborate pen-and-ink flourishes. The privateer captain was expected to keep a journal and to hand over all ships and goods seized to an Admiralty Court to be assessed and valued. A proportion of the value went to the sovereign; the rest went to the ship’s owners, her captain and crew. In theory, an authorized privateer was recognized by international law and could not be prosecuted for piracy, but the system was wide open to abuse and privateers were often no more than licensed pirates.